Voir Dire Redux

*This story came from watching how a shared experience, like jury duty, can turn two strangers into allies before they ever touch. Thanks for reading; I hope the slow burn feels earned.*

Michaela had been told by the summons letter to arrive at eight sharp, and she had, and now it was eleven and she was still sitting in the same vinyl chair she'd been assigned in the same gray room with the same fluorescent hum overhead and the same smell of stale coffee drifting in from somewhere she couldn't locate. Forty-four years old, coach of a cross-country team that could run circles around her, and here she was trapped in a concrete box from 1974 with forty strangers waiting to see who would get picked to decide somebody else's money problems.

She'd known jury duty would be boring. She hadn't known it would be this specific kind of boring, the kind where the judge reads instructions in a voice like a screensaver and the lawyers take turns asking questions that all sound like the same question wearing different hats. The case was a civil thing, a contractor dispute, and the judge had said it would take a week, which meant a whole week of her mornings, and she was already doing the math on practice schedules in her head.

"Potential jurors, when I call your name please move to the jury box," the bailiff said. He was an older guy, heavyset, with the calm of a man who had done this a few thousand times. His name tag said Bernard, and he said it like he knew everyone would forget it anyway.

So Michaela ended up in the second row of the box, third seat, and the guy they seated next to her arrived a minute later with a paperback wedged in his back pocket. She noticed the book before she noticed him, honestly, because it was one of those paperbacks that had been read so many times the spine had gone white and soft, and when he sat down he kept reading it, one thumb hooked into the pages like a bookmark he'd grown there.

The judge was asking another round of questions about whether anyone had ever been sued, and Michaela leaned over maybe two inches.

"What is that you're reading?" she asked.

The guy looked up. He was maybe forty, sandy hair going gray at the temples, the kind of face you'd call friendly if friendly were a weather condition. "Oh, uh, Lonesome Dove," he said. "Fourth time through. It's kinda my security blanket."

"Fourth time? That book's like nine hundred pages."

"Yeah, well, I do a lot of sitting," he said, and he smiled a little. "Furniture refinisher. Lots of waiting for varnish to dry. Varnish and cowboys, that's my whole life."

She laughed before she could stop herself, and it surprised her, because she hadn't laughed much in six months and she knew exactly why, and she didn't want to think about that right now, so she didn't.

"Michaela," she said, and put her hand out like an idiot, and he shook it like it wasn't an idiot move at all.

"Keith."

Then a lawyer asked Keith whether he had strong feelings about contracts, and Keith said, "Well, I strong-feel that people oughta do what they say they're gonna do," and the judge's mouth twitched, and Michaela looked at her lap so she wouldn't laugh again in open court.

They both got seated. Of course they did. The lawyers picked from the pool like it was a schoolyard, and there they were, third seat and fourth seat, second row, for a whole week.

* * *

The lunch break came at noon and Bernard herded them down the hallway to a break room that had a coffee machine older than most of the jurors. Michaela got in line at the little deli cart they'd set up near the courthouse entrance, ordered a turkey sandwich, and then got to the register and found her wallet sitting on her kitchen counter at home, exactly where she'd left it when she was late that morning.

"You gotta be kidding me," she muttered.

"Take mine," said a voice behind her, and it was Keith, holding out a half a roast beef sandwich wrapped in wax paper like it was a gift from a nicer decade. "I always order too much. My ex used to say I ordered for two out of habit. I just order badly."

"Oh, no, I can't take your lunch!"

"You can, and you are, because I will just eat the chips and be fine, and you'll be over there starving through testimony about drywall invoices. Nobody deserves that."

She took it. "Okay, but I owe you one, and I pay my debts, unlike apparently some contractors in this county."

He laughed at that, a real one, and they ended up sitting on the concrete bench outside the courthouse doors because the break room was full and it was actually warm out, first nice day in a while, and the sun on the 1970s concrete made the whole plaza smell like hot stone and parking lot.

The sandwich was good. The conversation was better, which was not what she'd expected from a guy who spent his days stripping finish off old dressers.

"So how'd you end up coaching cross country?" he asked. "The summons said occupation, I peeked."

"You peeked at my form?"

"Everyone peeks at everybody's form. Bernard reads them all, I think. He knows things."

She told him, more than she meant to, about the team and the kids and how running was the only thing that had ever made her own head quiet, and he listened the way some people do, actually listening, not just waiting for his turn. Then she asked about the furniture, and he got going about a 1960s teak sideboard he was bringing back from the dead, and his hands moved when he talked about it, describing how the grain came up under oil, and she watched those hands and then made herself stop watching those hands.

Six months. That's how long since she'd moved out of the apartment she'd shared with Lois for fourteen years, since the conversation on the couch where they'd both been so reasonable about it, so grown up, so damn polite, and she'd spent those six months being fine, being busy, being very functional, and here she was staring at a stranger's forearms on a courthouse bench.

"This coffee situation," Keith said, holding up the paper cup he'd bought from the cart, "is a crime. I've had better coffee at a gas station in the rain."

"Oh my god, yes. I got some this morning out of politeness and I couldn't finish it. It tastes like the outside of a coffee cup."

"Like they brew it by showing beans to hot water from across the room."

She laughed so hard she had to set the sandwich down. "Exactly that. It's punitive. I think it's on purpose, to keep the jury alert."

"Or to keep them docile," he said. "Hard to rebel when you're gagging."

They sat there another ten minutes past when they probably should have gone back in, talking about nothing, about his dog and her trail routes and whether the judge's reading glasses were the same kind her uncle used to wear, and when Bernard stuck his head out the door and said, "Jury, we're back in five," in a voice that had ended a thousand conversations, they got up, and Keith took her trash without making a thing of it.

"You owe me a sandwich," he said as they walked in.

"I do. I keep excellent books. Ask anybody."

"Yeah? Well, I collect on Fridays," he said, and went back to his seat, and picked up Lonesome Dove, and hooked his thumb back into the spine like he hadn't just said something that she was going to think about for the rest of the afternoon while a man in a bad suit talked about payment schedules.

* * *

Day two started with drywall invoices, which was somehow worse than day one's payment schedules, and Michaela discovered something about herself that she filed away under embarrassing: she was looking forward to the afternoon break. Not the break itself, not the coffee or the fresh air, but the part where Keith would describe whatever he'd worked on that morning before the summons dragged him here, because the man talked about furniture the way some guys talked about sports, with his whole face.

"Same customer, the dresser," he said, at the afternoon break, sitting on the same concrete bench like it had been assigned to them by the state. "She wanted it painted white. White, Michaela. It's 1938 walnut."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her white paint on walnut is a crime against dead trees, and then I offered to do the oil finish for the same price, and now she's crying about how her mother kept linens in it." He shook his head. "People don't know what they've got until some guy with sandpaper explains it to them."

"That's true of most things," she said, and he looked over at her like maybe she'd said something with more layers than she'd intended, and she busied herself with the sandwich she'd brought this time, because she was not an amateur.

She was forty-four years old, for god's sake. She coached teenagers for a living, she paid bills on time, she had run six marathons, and here she was doing mental arithmetic about a man's hands.

"You're doing it again," Keith said.

"Doing what?"

"Staring at my hands."

"I was staring at my sandwich."

"Your sandwich is on the bench, and you're looking at my hands," he said it without any heat, almost pleased, and she felt her face go warm and decided that honesty was the only way out. "Fine. Your hands. They're very, hmm, they're interesting hands. There. Arrest me."

"They're just hands. I sand things."

"You sand things with your hands, Keith, that's how hands work." He laughed, and she laughed, and Bernard opened the door and said the words about five minutes, and they went back in, and the rest of the afternoon was contractor testimony that made her eyes cross.

* * *

Deliberations started on day four, in the gray jury room with the fluorescent hum and the coffee nobody drank, and it got loud fast. The contractor dispute had seemed simple until twelve strangers tried to agree on damages, and then it wasn't.

"Look, the invoices show the materials were ordered twice," said the retired schoolteacher in the corner. "That's a fact."

"That's not a fact, that's a duplicate filing, and the supplier credited it back, I read the exhibit," Michaela said, before she'd even thought about it, and then she kept going, because once you start defending something in a jury room you can't really stop. "But even if you set that aside, the timeline doesn't work. Keith said it at the break yesterday, and I think he's right. The contractor couldn't have poured the footings when he claimed, because it rained for a week. Everybody in this county remembers that week."

Heads turned toward Keith, who was sitting at the far end of the table looking mildly stunned, and Fay, the foreperson, tapped her pen and said, "Okay, that's actually a helpful point, let's build on that," and they did, and by the end of the afternoon the room had a direction.

In the hallway, waiting for Bernard to sort out the parking lot traffic, Keith came and stood next to her.

"You didn't have to do that," he said.

"Do what?"

"Throw my name in there. It's a jury room, not a courtroom. You made me sound like an expert."

"You read the exhibits more carefully than anybody else in there. I saw you with the highlighter." She shrugged. "I just said what you already said. You were right."

"Still. Thanks." And then he just looked at her, steady, no smile, no joke about hands or coffee, just a long level look that went on one second longer than looks between jurors go, and her stomach did something like a drop on a roller coaster, that falling